We wanted to give an update on her teeth. Unfortunately we haven't made much headway yet. It seems that it is one step forward and 2 back. We have had a hard time finding a dentist that will work on her because of her age. Because she needs so much work done, she will need to be put under and that requires the dentist to do the work at a hospital. What we are finding is that most hospitals aren't equipped to sedate kids under 3. So we are kind of stuck trying to find a dentist that will work out of a children's hospital that can do the sedation. We are now on our 4th dentist and we think she will be able to help us. Unfortunately, the dentist is out of our insurance network so we aren't sure how that will work out cost wise. But at this point, we just want to get her seen. Both dentists we've seen so far have expressed that her mouth is pretty bad and are betting that she is probably dealing with mouth pain on a daily basis. We just hate how we feel we were totally unprepared for this. And she had another flair up this week like she did in China. We noticed she was acting like she wasn't feeling good and then she started holding her jaw like she had when she got her infection in China. So we got her to the doctor right away who put her on an antibiotic. These types of infections will probably keep happening until we get her mouth fixed. But she has bounced back after taking the medicine so that is another one down.
The other side of this is the formula that she is pretty addicted to. Its really a double edged sword because on the one hand, her mouth is so bad that she can't really eat food normally so the doctor told us to keep her on the formula so she can get nutrition. But then the dentist told us that if we have any hope of saving some of her teeth then we at least have to get her off the formula at night. This was a pretty big blow to us because Mila is pretty needy at night usually requiring us to go in and attend to her several times in the night and usually end up in the bed with her. Every time she wakes up, it is because she wants her formula. So it was pretty daunting to us to now hear that we must get her off the formula immediately. So this week has been all about that. We have been making sure she has a bottle at dinner time, then we brush her teeth, and then switch her over to just water for the rest of the night. It has been pretty traumatic. Almost every night she has been having major meltdowns. It has been trying on us. And to top it off, Bobby got sick this week with bronchitis and Larkin has been taking all of the night duties. So that hasn't helped. But we do feel good about doing whatever we can to preserve what teeth she has left. At least Mila has taken to letting us brush her teeth. She happily goes into the bathroom and opens her mouth awaiting us to come in and brush her. Its a little heart wrenching though because she whimpers in pain when we got over her top teeth so we have been going really easy.
We suspect that her teeth situation is also affecting her eating as well. We do know that Miss Mila is a pretty picky eater because we give her tons of soft options that she should be able to handle but she often spits most of her food out after one bite. We aren't for sure if she is using food as a way to control her situation. Because we know some of the foods we give her she likes but she will spit them out just to spite us. That is why we are glad she is at least drinking the formula. But we have found that when we complain about this to other parents we often hear "all toddlers do that..." Except we aren't sure if this is true or not because we see plenty of other toddlers eating just fine.
Mila's vocabulary seems to be growing. She now says "I love you" except she has a hard time with "l"'s so she says "I wove you". She also says "Mina" for her name. She says "stop it" and "bottle" and "please". We also feel like she is understanding us more. We can ask her questions and she will nod her head yes or no. She seems to be really attached to both of us. In public, she will often look for us when she is off playing with friends. If she can't readily find us, she will start asking for Mama or Baba until we are found. She has been to a friends birthday party and visited both Lowes and ILC to see Mama's and Baba's friends.
